I grew up incredibly poor and went to school and had a very average upbringing.
My father was unemployed and I was the eldest of seven children. We were very poor. And when you ask how did we support ourselves, the only funding that we had was unemployment payments.
I come from a very humble background. My father had to work really hard to become an assistant director. For a large part of his youth, he worked in a mill and took up odd jobs to make ends meet. We lived in a small room and could only afford a meal a day.
When I was about 8 or 9, I lived in New Jersey with my mother and we were seven deep in one bedroom and sometimes we didn't have electricity.
My father left me when I was 6. My mother tried to take care of all of us on public assistance.
I didn't have life that good coming up. I wasn't born with a lot of money. We weren't dirt poor, but we weren't rich. All I knew was struggle.
I came from a poor family. My father was from Glasgow, Scotland; my mother's brothers were brakemen on the railroad. We didn't have anything but mush for breakfast.
I came from nothing. We didn't have money, so I started work at 14 because I really needed the money.
I come from a humble background, where my family was struggling to be called middle class.
My childhood was rough, we were poor and my parents were alcoholics, but nobody was mean. I knew I was loved. We were on welfare, but I never felt abandoned or unloved.
We had poverty in our house. Even on the council estate I knew I was one of the poorer kids. I used to go round my friends houses on a Sunday to get their Sunday dinner because my mum couldn't cook either so I used to love going round my mates and say: 'Can you ask your Mum if I can come in for Sunday dinner?'
When I was born, my family was so poor that there was no money to buy food. So the church bought groceries for us - there wasn't any kind of privilege.
Mother Goose, she's on the skids. Sure ain't happy, neither are the kids.
My mom was on welfare for the first five, six years of my life.
As a child growing up during the Korean War, I knew poverty. I studied by candlelight.
Basically, I was a kid growing up with a single mother in Brooklyn.
I was born in a poor family, a lower middle class family. My father was a clerk in the forest department. I was very bad at studies. I was not very good at sports, also.
My family's challenges meant we lived hand to mouth. There were weeks when we had neither electricity nor heating.
I didn't grow up in the slums or anything that dire, but I know what it is to grow up without having money or being able to support family.
I was brought up in a very ordinary family, in fact, a worker's family. Both my father and mother were ordinary citizens.
I did not come to Mumbai to act. I came here to look for a job as our business had shut down, and it was a difficult time for us.
Like David Copperfield, I was born amidst poverty and grew up in poverty. I did not own shoes. I did not bathe in water from a tap. I did no know about forks and spoons.
I was not somebody who watched a lot of films. We couldn't afford to. We came from struggling family background.
I grew up in poverty and my mother had to sacrifice a lot for us to eat and get an education - just imagine in a house where we were more than six children! But hard work and dedication is what it took for me to be here today.
Mum obviously did not earn much money to feed me and my siblings. She worked hard to raise us, but there was always something missing.
